Friday April 6, 2012

The rapidly evolving cloud ecosystem poses significant
challenges, as well as great opportunities, for the enterprise
segment, according to a new report from Gartner. Monitoring and
adapting to cloud computing trends
is one of five key, accelerating trends
Gartner identifies that will prove essential to enterprise
organizations over the next three years.

"Cloud computing is a major technology trend that has permeated
the market over the last two years. It sets the stage for a new
approach to IT that enables individuals and businesses to choose
how they'll acquire or deliver IT services, with reduced emphasis
on the constraints of traditional software and hardware licensing
models," said David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow.
"Cloud computing has a significant potential impact on every aspect
of IT and how users access applications, information and business
services."

Formal Decision Frameworks Facilitate Cloud Investment
Optimization: The range of benefits cloud computing
promises include a shift from capital-intensive to operational cost
models, lower overall cost, greater agility and reduced complexity,
according to Gartner, as well as freeing up IT resources and
refocusing them on higher value-added activities. Realizing them
requires careful examination and mapping them against a number of
challenges, including security, lack of transparency, concerns
about performance and availability, the potential for vendor
lock-in, licensing constraints and integration needs,
however.

Hybrid Cloud Computing Is an Imperative:
Coordinating and combining external cloud computing services
(public or private) and internal infrastructure or application
services-- hybrid cloud computing, " could lead to a unified model
in which there is a single 'cloud' made up of multiple cloud
platforms (internal or external) that can be used, as needed, based
on changing business requirements. Gartner recommends that
enterprises focus near-term efforts on application and data
integration, linking fixed internal and external applications with
a hybrid solution. Where public cloud application services or
custom applications running on public cloud infrastructures are
used, guidelines and standards should be established for how these
elements will combine with internal systems to form a hybrid
environment.

Cloud Brokerage Will Facilitate Cloud
Consumption: Cloud computing's greatest impact may be felt
in enterprise IT departments, which need to remold and refashion
themselves, Gartner says. Business line units are increasingly
going to need guidance, advice and assistance, and internal IT
departments can become cloud services brokerages (CSBs) to these
internal "customers," an intermediary role that's already taking
shape, Gartner notes.

Cloud-Centric Design Becomes a Necessity:
Enterprises need to go beyond just migrating existing enterprise
workloads to a cloud system and/or an application infrastructure,
according to Gartner. "This approach may provide benefits where the
workload has a highly variable resource requirement, or where the
application naturally lends itself to horizontal scalability.
However, to fully exploit the potential of a cloud model,
applications need to be designed with the unique characteristics,
limitations and opportunities of a cloud model in mind."

Cloud Computing Influences Future Data Center and
Operational Models: Enterprises will be well served by
adopting cloud services providers' practices and standards when it
comes to building their own data centers, Gartner says,
recommending that "enterprises apply the concepts of cloud
computing to future data center and infrastructure investments to
increase agility and efficiency."

"The trend and related technologies continue to evolve and
change rapidly, and there is continuing confusion and
misunderstanding as vendors increasingly hype 'cloud' as a
marketing term," added David Mitchell Smith, another vice president
and Gartner Fellow. "This level of impact, confusion, uncertainty
and change make cloud computing one of Gartner's top 10 strategic
technology trends to address."